IMF head calls on ministers to help save fragile recovery

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Friday urged global finance ministers to stop trying to manipulate their currencies for economic advantage and instead to join to save a fragile recovery.

The global economy is struggling to emerge from the worst recession since the end of World War II, said IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Unless the pace of job growth quickens, he said, “we really face the risk of a lost generation” of young people unable to get work.

Strauss-Kahn’s remarks came as finance ministers from around the world gathered in Washington for the annual meetings of the 187-nation IMF and its sister lending organization, the World Bank.

BlackBerry smartphone ban called off by UAE authorities

Waterloo, Ontario-based Research In Motion Ltd. averted a ban on its BlackBerry smartphone in the United Arab Emirates after the country’s phone regulator said Friday that the company’s messaging services now comply with local regulations.

“All BlackBerry services in the U.A.E. will continue to operate as normal,” the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, which had threatened to ban the service over security concerns, said in a statement on its website. The ban had been slated to take effect Monday.

RIM said Friday it continues to follow the principles for working with the government that it laid out in an Aug. 12 statement and wouldn’t comment further. In the statement, RIM said there have been no changes to the security of its corporate e-mail system.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to end profit-sharing contributions

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the largest U.S. private employer, plans to end profit-sharing contributions in February, replacing them with matches to employee 401(k) retirement plans to bring down benefits costs.

The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer will match contributions up to 6 percent of eligible employees’ pay, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. Previously, Wal-Mart automatically put up to 4 percent of pay into the profit-sharing plan, said spokesman David Tovar.

Since taking over in 2009, CEO Mike Duke has vowed to slow expense growth, aiming to counter five consecutive quarters of sales declines at U.S. stores open at least a year.

Some money saved from the switch will go toward quarterly bonuses for store employees, Tovar said.

Drugmaker to eliminate 1,700 jobs in United States

Sanofi-Aventis SA, the world’s fourth-biggest drugmaker, said Friday it is eliminating 1,700 jobs in its U.S. pharmaceutical business in a restructuring triggered by growing generic competition and other factors. The news comes as the French firm’s struggle to buy U.S. biotech company Genzyme Corp. drags on.

The layoffs amount to about 25 percent of the workers in the company’s U.S. pharmaceutical business, and will primarily hit sales representatives around the country and administrative staff at Sanofi’s U.S. headquarters in Bridgewater, N.J.

Three of Sanofi’s top four products — blockbuster anticlotting medicines Lovenox and Plavix and cancer drug Taxotere — have new generic competition or will get it soon, jeopardizing just more than $10 billion of the company’s $40 billion in annual sales.

Buffett says his businesses focus on ‘entrance strategy’

Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s billionaire chairman, says he avoids acquiring companies from leveraged-buyout firms because they focus on “exit strategy.”

“We have an entrance strategy,” he said in pre-recorded remarks aired Thursday at a San Francisco conference for the International Corporate Governance Network, a London-based nonprofit. Buyout firms “don’t know the business,” he said.

Buffett, 80, built Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire into a $205 billion provider of insurance, energy and consumer goods through 40 years of stock picks and takeovers. He looks for companies with durable competitive advantages and leaves their managers in charge.